SAN FRANCISCO / 17 massage parlors closed by task force / Undercover drive by the city against human trafficking

Published 4:00 am, Friday, May 18, 2007

A special San Francisco task force designed to combat human trafficking has closed 17 massage parlors suspected of forcing immigrant Asian women into sex work.

In the past 18 months, a team of undercover police officers, along with city fire, building and environmental health inspectors, has been conducting surprise inspections of suspected erotic massage parlors.

The 17 Asian massage parlors were closed after incurring at least three health and safety violations within a year. Four others were fined, suspended and allowed to reopen after a temporary closure. Two others closed voluntarily.

But a handful of parlors shut by the city have since reopened illegally, and one has applied for a new permit as an acupuncture clinic with massage.

"Enforcement has not been as effective as we had hoped, but we are making a dent," said Johnson Ojo, San Francisco's principal environmental health inspector.

"It's much harder to open a massage parlor in San Francisco now because we are taking a hard look at an owner's past history, and denying permits if they have been involved in prostitution before."

Enforcement has been difficult, but Mayor Gavin Newsom said the task force is making headway into a problem that until now has gone largely undetected.

"There is momentum and a commitment to resolve this," Newsom said. "We are moving away from looking at this issue as harmless prostitution to a criminal act against human dignity and human rights."

San Francisco is a major hub for the $8 billion global sex trafficking industry, and is home to more than 100 erotic massage parlors listed online and in Asian-language newspapers.

Traffickers abroad charge women tens of thousands of dollars to smuggle them into the city, and then force them to work off their debts in erotic massage parlors, sometimes servicing more than a dozen men a day. Sometimes the women are lied to about the type of work they will be doing in the United States.

Often the women are forced to live in the same parlors where they work, and are watched on surveillance cameras and kept inside by metal security doors.

After a sex trafficking investigation by The Chronicle, Newsom increased surprise inspections last fall from once to twice a month, and the Board of Supervisors passed a law requiring public hearings of all proposed massage parlors. The city and nonprofit agencies placed human trafficking posters with hot line numbers in bus shelters.

Ojo has issued cease and desist orders to the parlors that have illegally reopened after their permits were revoked, and he is working with the city attorney to get court warrants allowing him to send sheriff's deputies to shut the places.

On Wednesday, the inspection team returned for a second visit to CEO Health Club, on the sixth floor of an office building on Sansome Street.

Inside the club, six women were cited for wearing inappropriate attire -- lingerie and clear plastic heels -- and one of them was cited for working without a massage practitioner's license. The business was also cited for employing an unlicensed masseuse.

One woman, in tears, said she left a dying father in China and that she didn't like working in the massage parlor. She said she wants to teach piano to children.

The new citations at CEO Health Club, and similar violations recorded in August, are enough to revoke the club's permit, Ojo said.

"We have to build up a case against each one, and while it takes a long time and uses a lot of city resources, it is starting to show results," he said.

Newsom said he plans to begin enforcing a rarely used 1913 "red light" abatement law that allows authorities to fine and jail California landlords who let massage parlors operate as brothels in their buildings. He will also deliver a speech on human trafficking at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Los Angeles in June.